Introduction

After repeated military defeats by Russia in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Iran, hitherto a great power in the region, was shocked by a sudden awakening to its weakness vis-à-vis the West and thus began a conscious attempt to modernize, i.e.

This view was not of course shared by all involved. To some Westernization was a dream and to others a spectre. Caught up between the two conflicting currents were the masses, who were perplexed by a paralysing dissonance, to say the least.

One of the areas which most sharply reflected the contrast between Iran and the West was the system of justice, and thus “demand for law,” in both the political as well as the judiciary senses of the term, came to be the most important ideological force in Iran throughout the nineteenth century.

If the strictly political aspect of this “demand for law” met the opposition of the country's age-old absolutistic political establishment and led to a bloody constitutional revolution, its judiciary side was not any easier. It meant on the one hand intrusion in the domain of, and direct threat to the vested interests of, a most powerful group, the ulama (Islamic clergy), and on the other hand supplementation if not supersession of a highly rigid and well-established judiciary system, the Sharia, which for centuries had been regarded sacred and immutable.

This paper is concerned with the latter aspect, the judiciary reform. The process, as we shall see, was tedious and, as the revolution of 1978 and its aftermath substantiate, the new Westernized judiciary system failed to achieve an appreciable degree of institutionalization in the society or integration with the traditional Sharia judiciary.

To provide a complete picture of the reform, its outcome and background, we shall devote the first part of this chapter to a short but comprehensive description of the traditional judicial system in Iran. In the second part the process of reform from its beginning in the nineteenth century to the end of the Pahlavi period will be discussed. In the third part I shall take a static look at the modern law and judiciary in Iran, and shall examine the various codes from the point of view of their legislative technique, legal structure and underlying philosophy. And finally, in part four, an attempt will be made to draw certain conclusions from the whole project.